00:00 Intro — A trip down Memory Lane
02:22 2006 — A disappointing illegal alien
05:12 2007 — Lefties l-o-v-e Cuba
07:54 2008 — China wins the thousand meters whine
11:59 2009 — Napolitano on the (wrong) border
15:11 2010 — Arizona’s law on illegals
18:15 2011 — The Donald throws his hair into the ring
26:02 2013 — Refugee roulette
32:24 2014 — A forgiveness too far
37:53 2015 — A mayor among the kulaks
47:04 2016 — Happy Birthday, ERII!
51:49 Signoff
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your fervently genial host John Derbyshire, this second weekend of April 2024.
This is one of my pre-recorded podcasts. Next week's likewise. The second and third weeks of April this year I shall be exceptionally busy; so I shall record them in the first week, before all the busyness overwhelms me. I have occasionally done this before under similar circumstances.
But then, Derb, I hear you cry, how can you be commenting on current events? Well, I am trusting to Providence that no natural catastrophe or political upheaval has transpired in between my recording this and your hearing it, and no war or plague broken out.
Trusting thus, I shall dig into the archives and give you Radio Derb segments from Aprils in previous years. This will be a trip down Memory Lane.
To simplify the work of selection, in fact, all the segments in this podcast and the next are lifted from the third week of April in years gone by, from 2006 to 2023.
So here we go: the third week of Aprils past, as recorded by what I am guessing may be the longest continuously-aired National Conservative podcast on the internet.
02 — 2006: A disappointing illegal alien. Radio Derb started up in 2004, but took a while to settle into a regular weekly schedule. The first time we aired on a third Friday in April was April 21st, 2006.
The federal government wasn't as wildly irresponsible about illegal immigration back then as it has since become, but they weren't policing the issue with inflexible rigor, either.
03 — 2007: Lefties lo-o-ove Cuba. As I record this on April 2nd 2024, we are seeing regular reports of hunger, even starvation, in Cuba. Are our lefties still swooning over that country, as Michael Moore was in 2007?
04 — 2008: China wins the thousand meters whine. The 2008 Summer Olympics were held in Peking. Did I take the opportunity to say rude things about the ChiComs? Of course I did.
05 — 2009: Napolitano on the (wrong) border. The name Janet Napolitano mean anything? She's still drawing a government salary, I see, as a member of Joe Biden's Intelligence Advisory Board. Can she do as much harm to the nation there as she did when she was Barack Obama's first Secretary for Homeland Security? Let's hope not.
06 — 2010: Arizona law on illegals. In the second year of Obama's administration Arizona tried to make illegal immigration illegal by passing Senate Bill 2070. The pro-crime lobbies were of course outraged.
07 — 2011: The Donald throws his hair into the ring. In April 2011 we were starting to think seriously about the following year's election. "What have we got?" I asked at the end of Segment 3. Here's Segment 4.
08 — 2013: Refugee roulette. In April 2012 there was a slight disturbance in the spacetime continuum, with the result that there was no podcast in the third week of that month.
By April 2013 I was firmly back in the saddle, ripping open and exposing the refugee rackets.
09 — 2014: A forgiveness too far. Here's me venting in 2014, venting over a question that I have vented over periodically all through my career as an opinionator. The question comes at the very end.
10 — 2015: A Mayor among the kulaks. In April 2015 Bill de Blasio was well into his second year as Mayor of New York City. It looked as though he was going to try for a Presidential run in the following year's election.
11 — 2016: Happy birthday, ERII! The April 15th podcast in 2016 had words to say about Britain's Queen Elizabeth the Second, whose 90th birthday was imminent.
12 — Signoff. That has taken us from 2006 to 2016. Our trip down Memory Lane will continue in next week's podcast.
In the meantime thank you for listening, for your emails and your kind donations. I am as always way behind with email, this month even further behind than usual, so please bear with me.
Here is Gracie Fields to sing us out. There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Gracie Fields, "Sing As We Go."]
